Even in appointing a special counsel last week to look into torture,
Eric Holder essentially directed him to IGNORE whether a crime was
committed in ordering torture in the first place. The only mandate
lifelong Republican prosecutor John Durham has been given is about
whether department personnel EXCEEDED the instructions they were
given. The "just following orders defense" rejected at Nuremberg has
been resurrected by our new Attorney General.
With Holder doing such a weak job of enforcing the law on his own, it
is all the more important to get Congress to reassert itself in all
these matters, in particular the abuse of war powers under which all
the torture happened in the first place. And HR 104, To establish a
national commission on presidential war powers and civil liberties,
appears to be a good step in this direction. We should not
preemptively exclude congressional commissions or investigations as a
route to real justice, for that is what Watergate was all about.
Congress must act NOW to constrain ALL future presidents, including
Obama, lest we end up with worse than Bush before we know it.
Presidential War Powers Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1001.php How all those Nazi war criminals would have wished for a standard
like that set by Eric Holder. Legal opinions no matter how corruptly
or self-servingly drafted become get out of prison free cards. Never
might that there were many valiant, patriotic people in the CIA and
the FBI, the vast majority, who STRENUOUSLY objected to the adoption
of torture as accepted U.S. policy. The fact is that NO member of any
one of these agencies could have believed in good faith that the
torture techniques condemned when used by every other totalitarian
regime were suddenly squeaky clean in their hands.
That is what is so disingenuous about Holder's posture, a refusal to
actually confront the real issue. Either we are a nation of laws or
else we are not. And if the Justice Department was issuing opinions
that were patently bogus in defense of torture, it is corruption in
HIS OWN department that must be rooted out, and all involved in such
outrages must be held fully responsible.
Instead, Holder's suggestion is essentially that a couple so-called
"bad apples" should be scapegoated, just as the contractors directing
the torture at Abu Grahib, under orders that came direct from the
White House, were allowed to skate away, while the lowest level
grunts were given 10 years of hard time. At this point, the best way
to pressure Holder to actually do his job is to pressure Congress to
do theirs, and execute their own investigation into the abuse of war
powers.
Presidential War Powers Action Page:
http://www.peaceteam.net/action/pnum1001.php And yes, we will continue to hear lies about how splendidly well
torture worked, even though it did not, to try to seduce the American
people into endorsing the abominable. Cheney was all over the TV over
the last couple months asserting that the recently released CIA
report would absolve him, by showing how torture led to all kinds of
great intelligence breakthroughs. There was nothing like that in
there. Instead, there were detailed specific instructions on
executing torture, adopted from and imitating the worst dictatorships
in history, in clinical detail like something out of World War II
Nazi bureaucracy.
The Washington Post is in up to their hips with this disinformation
campaign, running a story over the weekend with a headline suggesting
that waterboarding and sleep deprivation were a boon to intelligence.
And yet when you actually read it you find that WHILE Khalid Sheik
Mohammed was being waterboarded 183 times he was giving false
intelligence that was harmfully counterproductive. It is only AFTER
the criminal mistreatment stopped, and much later, that he actually
started to cooperate.
So let us make no mistake, the people who did these things in our
name were a handful of true sickos, getting in their own sadistic
jollies to the disgrace of the good name of the United States of
America. And not just those few who willingly went along with it
without objection, those who authorized, justified it, and ordered it
must also be held responsible, right back to the desk of former Vice
President Dick Cheney, and his go along patsy, George Bush. If Holder
is so anxious to relieve CIA employees of responsibility, let them
testify against the real criminal kingpins in the White House, as the
price of their immunity.
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